Photo by Ross Killion, AsAmNews
By Gus Mercado, Philippine-American Chamber of Commerce
America’s long history of hatred and violence against Asians reared its ugly head once again with the recent tragedy in Atlanta where 8 women, 6 of them Asian were massacred by a racism-motivated young
White man wielding a weapon of war that he had just bought.
The killings marked the dreadful pandemic year as one of intense and misplaced anti-Asian racism in the U.S. According to an advocacy group “Stop AAPI Hate” there have been more than 3800 incidents involving
reported involving discrimination and violence targeted at Asian people in the past year alone.
Many more had not been reported. A coalition of civil rights groups estimated more than 2,100 incidents.
In Midland, Texas an Asian family including two young children were stabbed at a Sam’s. The assailant was captured and said he stabbed them because he thought they were spreading Coronavirus. The Asian family was not even Chinese.
A Filipina nurse tearfully reported that after working 18 hours straight in a hospital’s emergency room, she stopped at a grocery store to buy some essentials and was greeted by a couple of old ladies shouting anti-Asian slurs. The Filipina nurse is fair-skinned with Chinese facial features.
Closer to home, a diminutive 77-year-old Filipina who is a charter board member of the Philippine American Chamber of Commerce in North Texas was denied service at a local QT grocery store and was given the dirty look by the clerk who was mumbling racist words.
The feisty senior citizen who is a martial arts aficionada held her ground and was ready for anything untoward. It was her burly and outspoken
American husband who confronted the clerk and strongly put him in his place.
Meanwhile, a story went viral about a 75-year-old Chinese woman in San Francisco who fought back and sent her assailant to the hospital.
Stories circulated around New Year 2021, some captured on video, about elderly Filipinos and other Asians actually being assaulted on San Francisco and New York streets.
A 91-year-old Thai retiree in Oakland was assaulted during his morning walk and killed. A Filipino’s face was slashed in a subway station. All for no
reason except a mistaken belief that the Chinese brought COVID-19 to the U.S. And it didn’t matter that many of those assaulted were not even Chinese.
Is this American enough?
It also didn’t matter if the victims of anti-Asian hatred were born and raised in the U.S. and served heroically in the military. CNN showed 78-year-old Lee Wong, a war veteran and Purple Heart recipient who came to the U.S. as a child, giving an impassioned speech in a town hall meeting. He tearfully
shared that when people looked at him with accusing eyes, he told them he is an American.
And some would say “You are not American enough, you are not patriotic enough!” So, at the town hall meeting he took off his shirt and showed everyone the scars that covered his entire body caused by 6 enemy bullets that pierced his body during the Vietnam War. And he declared: “Is this American enough?” “Is this patriotic enough?”
Asian Americans do not deserve the xenophobic and bigoted attacks against them that are spiking in America, falsely attributing to them the origin and meteoric spread of Coronavirus. Asian Americans are also
victims of the pandemic. And hundreds of thousands of Asian American medical professionals and hospital workers who risk their own lives saving COVID-19 victims are heroes who deserve to be thanked and congratulated, not hated.
The “Model Silent Minority Community”, discriminated for a century, now lives in fear
There are 575,000 Asian businesses in the U.S. that feel threatened. The scapegoating is reminiscent of old racist tropes that led to the discrimination of Asian immigrants in the U.S. – from the quarantining of San Francisco’s Chinatown during the bubonic plague of the 1900s, to the rounding up of Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, to the traditional discrimination in visa quota allocation against Asians by the U.S. Immigration Service over the years.
It did not help that historically, hardworking Asians have been the subject of scorn and jealousy as America’s “silent model minority community” with the highest per capita income and the highest education level in the U.S. among immigrant groups and the least chances of getting into trouble with the law.
Asian-Americans are builders, not destroyers
A former President of the United States once said that if Asian American doctors and nurses (particularly Filipinos, Indians, Chinese and Korean) would leave the country, the entire American health system will collapse.
Unbeknownst to many mainstream Americans especially the younger generations, Asian Americans have played a significant role in the building of this country and to its supremacy as the most economically powerful nation on earth.
Notable Americans of Asian descent have been responsible for the country’s global leadership in high technology and modern sciences. Among these are the Asian-American CEOs or cofounders of Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Master Card, You Tube, Hotmail,
NVidia, FitBit, Adobe, Pepsico and many others. It was also an Asian American scientist who discovered the cure for the Ebola virus and is busy at work on potential cure for COVID-19.
Asian Americans are typically soft-spoken and humble to a fault. The many thousands of Asian medical professionals will never flaunt their own personal sacrifices as front-liners and willing warriors in the war against the deadly Coronavirus. Asian business and technical professionals such as
engineers, scientists, architects, accountants, educators and others are low-keyed as they lead the technology revolution in the country.
They should all be applauded and thanked, instead of being shunned and
mistreated by clueless and ungrateful segments of our society. And it is wrong to curb the immigration into this country of these skilled and talented professionals. America must continue to be open to Asian immigration, especially the highly-skilled professionals. America and all of us will be better for it.
About the Author: Gus Mercado is Chairman/CEO of Datalogix, an all-minority telecom engineering company in Texas and Silicon Valley. His employees, mostly Filipino and Asian telecom engineers, have never missed a day of work during the pandemic, knowing their services are essential to the survival of the US economy. A Presidential BANAAG awardee, he served for 10 years as Founding Executive Director of the Philippine-American Chamber of Commerce and State Chairman of the Asian American Voters Coalition (AAVC) in the ‘90s. He remains active in advocating for national political and economic empowerment for Filipinos, Asians and other
minority groups. Reactions to this article may be sent to [email protected].
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